Field note
Reading your electricity bill for mining costs
Most optimistic mining sheets collapse a utility invoice into one kilowatt-hour figure. That shortcut hides demand charges, seasonal riders, and power-factor penalties that decide whether a small fleet clears break-even in humid months.
Start with three columns
Create columns for energy (kWh), demand (kW), and everything else. Energy belongs in the variable mining cost. Demand often belongs in facility overhead unless your contract is purely energy-only. “Everything else” holds renewables riders, metering fees, and taxes—decide once whether they ride with mining or with the building.
Watch the peak that set demand
If a single evening of overlapping machine commissioning and HVAC testing set your demand peak, that peak may haunt the whole billing period. Note the timestamp. In profitability advisories we often find operators who never connect that spike to a maintenance window.
Translate into the cost map
For each machine type, multiply nameplate draw by expected online hours, then add a cooling adder expressed as a percentage of IT load. Compare that sum to the energy column. The gap usually reveals phantom loads: idle PSUs, lights, or a dehumidifier that never entered the model.
Bring the PDF to a session
When you book a profitability advisory, send the full bill PDF—not a screenshot of the total. Advisors need the riders page to keep your break-even horizon honest.